#gemini protocl

[vvampa]

shattered horizon

i've been building my own computers since the early 2000s. my uncle used to donate his old pc parts to my brothers & i, and that kicked off our foray into pc building. fast forward many years and many birthday trips to Fry's later, and i finally was able to construct a pc capable of playing Crysis. playing (& beating) Crysis was probably one of my first completed bucket list items. (i don't keep an actual list, but i'm sure it would've been on there if i did.) fast forward another few years (or so?) and you'll find me booting up SHATTERED HORIZON, another vizually stunning work of art. one that died too soon.

most people are probably nostalgic for a few games. maybe some of those games even live up to the hype. but unlike a long-forgotten nintendo 64 or gamecube game, modern multiplayer games need more than just a cartridge/disk & a tolerance for outdated game mechanics. games like Shattered Horizon also need servers & players. the game might be playable alone, with bots, but that isn't the same thing. and i'm not even sure that's possible. i'm sure i'll get around to checking someday. but there are other games i've played that have been completely scrubbed from Steam. those games are 100% gone, never to be played again, unless by some miraculous incident they get uploaded to the Internet Archive or something.

it's sad to lose a game forever to the cybervoid. but i'll always have the memories -- or at least memories of feelings -- & the soundtrack on my Plex server. nostalgia is a blessing. it's being able to fondly remember something lost, without the acute pain that accompanies sudden detachment from worldly people & things. we didn't lose our favorite games overnight. these games instead slowly melted into the floorboards & walls of our mind, never leaving us but never the same.

nostalgia is mac & cheese for the mind.

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[ about Shattered Horizon ]

Shattered Horizon is a zero-gravity, space-based, multiplayer, first-person shooter game released in 2009. you fly around with a jetpack and can rotate in 360 degrees as you fight the enemy team. there was also some mechanic that made it easy to "land" on floating space stations & debree regardless of your angle, if i recall. the mechanics were the same as a regular fps game except if you held the right mouse button, you could then rotate along the y-axis and spin around. it was such a hoot flying & rotating around in space, shooting at players at any imaginable angle. i don't remember what game modes there were, but i'd guess it was the usual team versus team game modes like team deathmatch & so on.

looking at the wiki:

it was made by Futuremark Games Studio and required at least a Core 2 Duo processor (for Intel people), an Nvidia 8800GT (for Nvidia people), & Windows Vista.

the game is set in 2049. moon mining companies are raking in huge profits, which causes them to get greedy. this leads to a catastrophic mining accident. the International Space Agency gets weapons from Earth and attempts to apprehend those responsible from the Moon Mining Cooperative. the two factions fight over control of the Arc, fragments of the Moon orbiting the Earth.

i think this game's plot would make for a captivating 1980s-era space opera film.

[video] shattered horizon trailer

(written in 2024)